The Finns drink more coffee than anyone else in the world. If you read more, you’ll see what it has to do with NFC.

In the past year, I have given half a dozen presentations aimed to label printers and converters considering entry to smart label manufacturing. Just recently I introduced RAIN RFID to a group of printing professionals from Thailand and elsewhere in East Asia and South-East Asia in ASPT 2019 popup event in Bangkok. Many printing companies are thinking about how to replace declining ink-on-paper business, and smart labels are a good option popup.

RAIN RFID is being adopted increasingly in several industries such as automotive manufacturing, healthcare, and pharma. Because of the growing number of implementations, there is an increasing need for a solution that helps to scale up the implementations. One of the bottlenecks seems to be specifying RAIN tag performance in a way that enables the use of tags from several manufacturers in a system. Need for performance specification or for a method to classify tags comes up more and more frequently in industry meetings. The good news is that pioneering industries have solved these questions earlier, and there are working solutions ready for adoption.

I think this was my 11th time at the RFID Journal Live! show. For me the show is mostly about meeting a lot of customers and partners during a highly effective couple of days. The number of exhibitors seems to be going down, as is the number of people visiting the exhibition. At the same time, we are seeing less and less significant, new technical advancements at the show. Nevertheless, I think there is a valuable insight to be found: RFID is business as usual!

The RAIN RFID market has been growing nicely throughout the latest years. The latest news is that last year a total of 15.4 billion RAIN ICs were sold – and we are nicely on track for more than 20 billion in 2020. At the same time, the market penetration is still very low, so there is plenty of room to grow. We can already see 100 billion tags a year in the horizon. Then maybe another ten more years, and we will be at 1 trillion. However, several things in our thinking will need to change for that to happen.

Dear Santa, end of 2017 I was nervous about the talent pool in our business. Turns out I just wasn’t completely in the loop. In 2018 both the RAIN name and RAIN market enjoyed a well deserved boost. Best of all, there seems to be a consensus among manufacturers, brands and retailers that source tagging is the way to go. But - here are my wishes for a wonderful year 2019!